WCWM 90.9 FMWCWM 90.9 FM

Ted Hunnicutt was a sophomore when he handed the college president a 65-page case for a student station, and the AM signal that followed in 1956 was too weak to reach past one corner of a dorm room. It folded inside a year, so William & Mary took out an FM licence instead and put WCWM on the air on 28 September 1959 — classical only, closely supervised, students expected to absorb culture rather than dance to it. Rock crept back through a decade of small rebellions, and by the early seventies the oversight was gone for good.

Six decades on it runs on volunteer student and faculty DJs, around sixty shows a week, each hour shaped by whoever booked it: rap, shoegaze, psychedelia, soul, metal, electronica and experimental share the schedule with no house style to smooth them over. The brief is underground and independent music, new artists and forgotten ones, pulled from one of the largest record libraries on the East Coast.